Question

I am very new to version control and I would like some help if possible.

I was wondering, which is the best way of controlling 3 development environments: Development > Testing > Production

• Development(Localhost environment) – all the work developed is being done here before any upload
  • Every1 working on the specific project should have a clone of this folder (each collaborator with its user, if possible) and every push by user will be sent here, to development folder.
• Testing – Should be a clone folder that contains data pushed by Development and which is automatically synced with the subdomain testing using ftp, or whatever protocol.
• Production is the live site, where the stable updates are released.
  • Should it be a clone of Testing, or testing upon push should upload the data here?

How about conflict problems when a user pushes a file/s different from what other user pushed 1 minute ago? Of course there can be the task separation and each to do certain things but what if not, what if X commits submit.php and Y also commits submit.php 1 minute before?

What version control software will be most suited?

Answer 1

If you translate that in term of a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System), like Git, each of your “folders” can be an actual clone of your code repository.

That means that you:

• would push from your local development to ‘development‘ repo
• would push from ‘development‘ to ‘testing‘ (or better yet, have a task on ‘testing’ in charge of pulling ‘development‘ and trigger some tests if any new commit is detected
• would push from ‘testing‘ (if tests are ok) to production

Plus you wouldn’t accept non fast-forward update to remote repo, which means any conflict would be first solved locally, before being pushed.